The Beloved Community Matthew 5:43-47 Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday, Jan. 19, 2014 Dr. Stephen D. Jones, preaching First Baptist Church of Kansas City, MO One of the most special aspects of my seminary education was that my professor of Christian social ethics, Dr. Kenneth Snuffy Smith, was also Martin Luther King s professor of social ethics. And Snuffy Smith talked a lot about his year teaching King it was King s final year in seminary and Smith s first year of teaching at Crozer. Smith mostly talked with us in class about The Beloved Community, a concept that he felt was the lynch pin that held King s philosophy together. Yes, Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. His I have a Dream speech ranks alongside the Gettysburg Address in American history. But the real question is: what was King s dream? And Snuffy Smith felt that unless you confronted the idea of the Beloved Community, you missed the real substance. King did not invent this term. It was first coined by philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce, who founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation. King was a member of FOR, and he popularized the term and invested it with deeper meaning. As early as 1956, Dr. King spoke of The Beloved Community as the end goal of nonviolent boycotts. As he said in a speech at a victory rally following the announcement of a favorable Supreme Court Decision desegregating the seats on Montgomery s buses, The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. In 1958 he said, our ultimate goal is integration, which is genuine inter-group and inter-personal living. Only through nonviolence can this goal be attained, for the aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of The Beloved Community. (Stride toward Freedom) For King, the goal was never desegregation. That merely gave the right for black people to sit at lunch counters, use public restrooms and swim in the same swimming pools as white people. That was a necessary step along the way but it was never the goal. The goal was an integrated society based on justice and equality. Look at this congregation this morning. We are a microcosm of our larger society. We have Asians in our congregation, we have blacks and whites in our congregation. This is not a new phenomenon for our church though historically this was not true. When Jan and I were members in 1970, the Gunn family and Frazier family were our only black members. Nearly everyone else was white. We moved from our grand building on Linwood Boulevard out here to Red Bridge because while we tried valiantly to serve the needs of that neighborhood we did not reflect the neighborhood in our membership. And we can take great pride today that one of the greatest African American congregations in Kansas City, the Metropolitan Baptist Church, serves in the building that was formerly our own, and truly reflects and serves the neighborhood around them.
All the more ironic, then, that we came to Red Bridge not really so much as an escape not really to run away but facing reality we were not, at the time, poised to serve in that neighborhood. And we came here, and sixty years later, our congregation is racially integrated one of the few mainline congregations in Kansas City where this is true. The amazing thing to me, as your new pastor, is that this seems to occur in our church without a great deal of comment or effort. The diversity is here the friendships cross all the lines and we enjoy one another. Are we perfect? No, of course not. Do we perpetuate patterns of racism? Yes, of course. Do we perpetuate stereotypes of one another? Certainly. Do we sometimes forget to question our historical patterns? Yes. Do we need to re-invent ourselves in light of our diversity? Yes, we do. But, Martin Luther King was often quoted as saying that 11 o clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America and the Sunday School is the most segregated school in America. Sadly, this is still largely true. Now, no one wants to see the uniqueness of the Black church swallowed up. There is a reason for the segregation and a reason to hope that the Black worship experience and black theological insight not be homogenized into a larger American context. But the black church remains strong and we are not in danger of this happening. What we need to start seeing are integrated congregations across the entire spectrum of America s denominations. We will have failed the Beloved Community should we ever describe ourselves as a white church with some black members. That cannot define us. We are an interracial congregation striving to discover together what it means to model The Beloved Community within our congregation and for the world around us. And friends, it starts by sitting in the pew together. It starts by studying scripture together. It starts by being involved in mission projects together. It starts by nurturing our children and youth together. It starts with honest, liberating dialogue. When I first started as your pastor, I thought perhaps it was the Red Bridge neighborhood that had inspired our diverse membership. But from what I can tell, we are the only multi-racial congregation in this neighborhood. Dr. Leo Thorne, who served this church so admirably as its first black senior pastor, might be partially responsible, but many have noted that the diversity far pre-dates his tenure at First Baptist Church. I would still maintain that a church that would call a black man as its senior pastor is deserving of the diversity we enjoy today. But we cannot merely sit in our pews and pat ourselves on the back. We must embody the ideals of The Beloved Community. What is this? Surely it is a community where everyone is beloved for who they are, where everyone is valued for what they bring to the larger congregational table. Martin Luther King s dream of The Beloved Community didn t stop at the congregational level. He wanted a society in which everyone is beloved and a society where its resources are distributed so that no one is homeless and no one is hungry, no one is marginalized, and no one lacks opportunity.
Snuffy Smith spoke of how Martin was influenced by Jesus teaching of the Kingdom of God. This is language which has special meaning to followers of Jesus. The Kingdom of God, the reign of God in our society and in our time, speaks to us. But it probably does not speak to everyone. The Beloved Community speaks to everyone, includes everyone, and marginalizes no one. One of King s most quoted sentences speaks to this: We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And at another point he said, In a real sense all life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother s keeper because we are our brother s brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I wonder if as a society we have learned any lessons from the Great Recession out of which we are still slowly emerging. We know what largely caused the melt-down it was greed on behalf of Wall Street and careless financial schemes intended to make a few people inordinately rich. Yet, even today, our society continues to be marked by an ever-increasing wealth held by a privileged few while the poor get poorer and middle class jobs remain scarce. This does not reflect King s idea of The Beloved Community. Health care should be a basic human right. It should not be a privilege of those who can afford to pay for it. Too many lives in America have been shortened because people were too poor to engage in preventative care, or to address a medical concern early, instead of too late. My own family has been seriously impacted because of being cut out of health care. Jan and I had health insurance through her company until it went out of existence in 2012. We were shocked to learn that we could not purchase COBRA insurance because the company no longer existed. With medical preconditions, we were both forced into Kansas High Risk Pool Insurance. Missouri has a similar plan. It is very expensive and is mostly a catastrophic plan only for dire emergencies. And we found ourselves unable to go to our doctors and locked out of our specialists because they would not take patients lacking health insurance. We couldn t even pay cash to see our doctors. It was a helpless feeling. We learned first-hand the injustice of turning people away from health insurance because of preconditions. Pre-conditions are a primary reason people need insurance, but we tried every company and we kept hearing the same response: we will not insure you. So, despite deficiencies in the Affordable Care Act, we were looking forward to January of this year and the ability to purchase health insurance. And I give thanks to First Baptist Church and your forward-thinking, to offer health insurance to your employees at Punkin Patch and at the church. I cannot tell you what it means to Jan and to me. It has made such a difference in addressing our health care concerns. My son and daughter-in-law came to see us at Christmas. In their early 30 s, they have never had health insurance as adults and are getting to the age where it is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Both have minor health concerns that need to be addressed and can only be with insurance. So, when they came, I told them that I wanted to go onto the Affordable Care Website and see what it would take to secure health insurance. The Website worked quickly for us. Because they are both students and low-income, they were able to secure medical and dental
insurance at ¼ the actual cost. I would not stand before you and say that the Affordable Care Act is perfect it is the result of Congressional compromise. But, at least for my family, it has addressed four members being locked out of health insurance and opening up the access. I have had so few experiences in my life of being discriminated against, of being locked out of that which I rightfully deserved and having no way to correct the injustice. I have not been able to visit a medical specialist who is rather important to my wellbeing for over a year and because of health insurance I was able to see him on Friday. While this humbling experience has no doubt been good for me to know what it feels like, it is still a reminder of our inhumanity. I would submit that adequate health care and the security of knowing that no matter what health crisis you might face you can rely on insurance these are trademarks of The Beloved Community. I am saddened that the Legislatures of Missouri and Kansas have not had the compassion to extend Medicaid so that working class families can afford health care coverage. Their refusal means that our taxes support people in other states with this coverage but deny it to our own working class families. It is wrong. The Beloved Community is about agape love. Jesus said, You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven With a Father in heaven, who creates all life, then we can be nothing else but sisters and brothers to each other. We are members of the same human family the same human community that shares planet earth together. Our two children are adopted. That means that the four immediate members of my family do not look alike. We do not share the same gene pool. My son is a very large man, time and a half my size. Beside each other, he dwarfs me! We do not look alike but we surely are members of the same family, father and son, mother and daughter. And among all of us here in this room, we have different genes. Our skin colors are different. Our ethnic and cultural differences are real. We have different backgrounds. Our families come from different places. Our stories are unique. But, as the Apostle Paul said, we are of the same body. We belong to the same spiritual family. We are sisters and brothers in Christ Jesus. We may get on each other s nerves every once in a while and be amused at each other s idiosyncrasies. But that doesn t make us any different from any other family, does it? We are the Beloved Community at First Baptist Church. And you are my brothers and my sisters. Because I am related to you, the world is a little friendlier place. Because of you, I am not isolated and alone. Because of you, I can listen and learn to opinions and ideas that are different from my own, and not be threatened. Because of you, I have companions who walk with me along life s way. Because of you, if I stumble, I know you will pick me up and when I falter, you will draw me back in. Dr. King once said, The cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is a symbol of God s triumph over all the forces that seek to block community. (Stride toward Freedom, p. 105)
Let me close with Martin Luther King, Jr., telling us what he meant in his dream for American society, The Beloved Community: The dream is one of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where some will not take necessities from the many to give to a few; a dream of a land where people do not argue that the color of a person s skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a place where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; a dream of a country where every person will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality, and people will care to live together as brothers and sisters Whenever this dream is fulfilled, we will emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man s inhumanity to man and enter the bright and glowing daybreak of freedom and justice for all of God s children. (The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness, YMCA Magazine, Dec., 1960) Amen!